


Voices

by SleepsWithCoyotes



Category: Saiyuki (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Archival Fic, Don't copy to another site, First Meetings, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25228828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepsWithCoyotes/pseuds/SleepsWithCoyotes
Summary: Genjo Sanzo was in the woods the first time he heard it, and there were dead men at his feet, and he didn't feel a thing.
Relationships: Genjo Sanzo & Son Goku
Comments: 3
Kudos: 53





	Voices

**Author's Note:**

> Back to working on moving stuff over from the spambot...this one's from probably pre-2005.

He forgot words in that place, forgot that there had ever been anything but a cave and bars and him inside. He remembered at first that he had forgotten something else, somewhere else--that he had been made to forget--but then he forgot his forgetting and there was nothing but the wait. Sleeping, and long hours before he could sleep again. Days and nights spent staring at the links of his chains, heavy and solid. Hunger that started as a gnawing in his guts and then grew, his body hollowed out and filled with a cold, aching emptiness that made his thoughts and vision whirl and spin.

The hunger never really went away, but it settled almost unobtrusively into his bones. He stopped longing for voices long before the first decade crawled by, the habit of listening for one voice in particular erased with his past. He learned to move with the awkward chains, and though they dug into his wrists and ankles until they bled, he healed fast and seamless, his skin a new canvas every morning.

He'd forgotten what it was like to be half of a pair, for there to be something _other_ , until the bird wandered into his cage. He was hungry, but it cocked one bright black eye at him and puffed its feathers and trilled, and he couldn't see it as food anymore. He couldn't feed it, either, but somehow it didn't mind. It came to him every day and would hop onto his outstretched fingers, a living warmth that settled down trustingly in his hands. He couldn't remember anything as soft as its feathers, but he remembered how to laugh, grew used to the sound of his own voice again.

The bird died, but he'd lost all concept of time and age, so he didn't understand. From inside the bars, he could see it where it had fallen, a tired lump of pale feathers ruffled by the wind. Now he remembered loss. He remembered what it was like to _want_ to forget.

Even after the tears dried, some part of him was still crying, screaming, and it didn't stop.

***

Genjo Sanzo was in the woods the first time he heard it, and there were dead men at his feet, and he didn't feel a thing. To be fair, he hadn't felt anything since he left the monastery, but even when he met the blind, betrayed stares of the men he'd killed, he went on reloading his gun, fingers steady as he chambered each round. He wasn't sure what they'd wanted--his money or his body or his life, or all three--but he hadn't waited to find out. No more hesitations. He was done with that.

When the last bullet slid home, he snapped the cylinder shut and spun it, listening to the smooth clicks tapping out in the near-silence under the trees. Gunshots had startled the birds and insects into an unnatural stillness, but the rustle of leaves was a steady, soft hiss in his ears, the creak of tree limbs an irregular counterpoint. He heard no more footsteps, stealthy or otherwise, and that was what mattered.

He turned half away, took a step and-- _howling white emptiness, ragged and jagged and desperate, and every bird in the forest should have exploded into panicked flight at the sound of it, but there was nothing, nothing, only silence_ \--

It took an act of will to let his held breath out and draw another, listening not with his ears but something inside as the distant, wordless scream went on and on without a breath. There was no sense in it, nothing like language at all, just a vastness of hurt and bewildered heartbreak, the cry of a beast or a child.

' _It's because I heard a voice_ ,' he remembered his master saying, and memory silenced the unending scream as something inside him clenched tight. ' _You were calling_....'

His master had been kind. When Koumyou Sanzo found the abandoned child on the riverbank, the priest had taken him in, treated him like a son, gave him a place and a name. Died for him.

The voice was gone, and he almost told himself he'd imagined it. He wasn't given to flights of imagination, though, or to lies, and he stood for a moment longer, wondering if it would come again. With that much pain...maybe the owner of the voice had died.

Well, fine. That voice shouldn't look for _him_ to save it, anyway. Let it live or die under its own power; it was nothing to do with him.

He tucked the gun away, found the path again and continued on, leaving the bodies where they'd fallen. But he listened--he told himself he listened constantly--and when memories of his master's smile didn't get in the way, he heard it, a far-off whimper, no words, just enough to tell him the voice still lived.

' _There might be a time you'll hear someone's voice as well_....'

His master had been kind, and look where it got him. _He_ wasn't kind. He could ignore the voice, and he did--ignored it through that town and the next. It wasn't a particularly insistent voice; it was just there, crying, in the back of his mind. All the fucking time.

Sanzo hadn't cried since the morning he left the monastery. Part of him envied the voice for that.

***

He remembered other things now, too. The sun moved from east to west before the stone bars of his cave, but he could almost--almost--remember the touch of it on his face. Escape was like hunger, a need that bit and twisted inside him and was never fed, but now he remembered that it _was_ escape, that he hadn't always been here, that bars and cage and chains weren't natural to his existence. He had been put here. Therefore, he could be taken out again.

Not that he had words for that. What he had was feeling, a tightness that sang behind his ribs as he stared out at the world beyond, the serrated fangs of the mountains that ringed him in, the scrubby trees clinging to their rocks, the stunning cataract of a waterfall falling into smoke and clouds on the other side of the gorge. Huddled up close to the bars, he pushed his face between the pillars of rock and leaned there for hours at a stretch, straining at the length of his chains and trying to imagine himself free.

He hadn't always been here. He hadn't always been alone. And he wanted, fiercely, with everything that was in him, to be not-here and not-alone again.

***

Another town with no rumors and no clues. He was used to that, though. It wasn't so much that he was following a cold trail as that he had no fucking trail at all, but what did he expect? It'd been years since that night in the rain, since he'd started out on this pointless quest to get back what was his, and all he had to show for it was a much improved reload time and the distinction of having survived the three worst cut-rate hotel cooks in all of Shangri-La.

Lying curled on his side in bed that night, Sanzo watched the moonlight track across the door of his rented room. Dinner was an unhappy weight in his stomach, courtesy of a gap-toothed chef who had to be going for the fourth-worst spot and would, if Sanzo was any judge of incompetence, overtake the number two man once the idiot really hit his stride. He tried to remember if any notoriously third-rate poisoners had been returned to the Wheel about the time that man had been born, or if that sort of culinary talent could better be blamed on a previous life as an underachieving plague rat.

Thoughts like that would usually put him to sleep after a while, but the curtains in his too-small room were practically nonexistent, and the moonlight off the snow lit the room bright enough to glow through his lids even when he closed his eyes. And then there was the voice. It was always louder in the winter.

\-- _cold, so cold it burns, and emptiness, and heavy silences that muffle and constrict, and huddling close, so close, a tight knot of no warmth, no comfort, nothing but the unending cold_ \--

No words. That stupid voice didn't so much talk to him as beat at him with its impressions and feelings, almost like another self. It was like his mind existed in two bodies, but that was bullshit. For one thing, he would have had the sense to come in out of the cold. Fucking voice needed to shut up, do something about its situation, or die already.

Awake and staring at the wall, he lay there and let alien thoughts wash over him, _cold cold cold_. There was never any anger or blame in that voice, and he'd never heard so much pain without one or the other to keep it company. He'd never heard so much need in his life, not from grieving parents or the desperate poor or lovers on the other side of thin hotel walls. He hadn't known you could want anything that badly and not get it and still _feel_.

\-- _cold, please, it's so cold_ \--

\--" _Please_."

Sanzo rolled over onto his back and glanced at the window, the moon a soft-edged round glare through the curtains.

That voice wasn't going to die that easily.

In the morning, he punched the cook on the way out, settled his pack on his shoulder, and stood in the street for a long moment, unmoving, listening. The morning noises of the market district fell away from him, the clatter of carts and the braying of livestock, hawkers' cries and a shriek of outrage followed by a crash. He emptied himself of everything, and as a new scattering of snow drifted down to ice his hair and shoulders, he felt the yawning, dazed, and shivering wail of _**cold**_ bloom across his awareness, pulling him west and north of where he stood.

It was as good a direction as any. He might as well get moving.

***

Language came back to him a piece at a time. He talked in his sleep, woke from an unremembered dream with the words still on his lips, and scrambled frantically for more. It was slow going at first-- _cold, hunger, snow, cage_ \--but as winter changed into summer, he had _green_ and _warm_ and _alone_ and _please_. His thoughts clamored now, the silence of his long imprisonment utterly broken, his charmed life over. Without words, he hadn't minded the passing of decades, centuries. There hadn't been anything to hang that concept on, years drifting past in an unchanging sameness with no meaning. Now each day weighed on him, starvation and boredom and loneliness gnawing at him like fresh wounds.

Without words, there hadn't been questions. He hadn't asked why he was there or what he had done. He knew now that he had done something bad, very bad, though he couldn't remember what. It didn't seem fair that he should be trapped here without knowing why, but when he thought of all the things he'd forgotten, he found himself hesitating, uncertain that he wanted to remember anything bad enough to deserve this.

But he was sorry, he was, and he'd do better this time if they just let him out, please. He'd do anything.

"Please--" But there was no one around to hear him, and there never had been. No one ever came here. No one even knew he existed. He'd been forgotten, and there was no hope of forgiveness if you'd been forgotten, if there was no one to listen to your apologies. Even he knew that.

***

Chang-An wasn't so bad as cities went, and the assholes at the temple fell all over themselves to make him feel welcome. They were too much like the monks he'd grown up with, sucking up to any Sanzo that came along, so all they succeeded in doing was pissing him off. On the other hand, there were the Three Aspects.

The mark on his forehead set him apart, warned everybody who saw it that he was supposed to be closer to the gods than most people. That was a steaming load of crap, of course. In the years he'd been on the road, he'd managed to break every article of faith he'd been brought up with, and the closest he'd been to god was when he'd stormed into the Palace of the Setting Sun with a look in his eye that had sent minor priests scurrying out of his path like field mice at threshing time.

He hadn't expected to leave a priest if he left the inner sanctum at all, so he made the most of the opportunity, unloading the culmination of years of deep study and observation in a fifteen-minute soliloquy of such unmatched obscenity and vitriol, he'd actually seen awe dawn on the three serene faces hovering before him. It could also have been because he only paused thrice for breath. In the end he only stopped because he didn't care to repeat himself, and he stood there panting, furious, and not at all ashamed, waiting to be stripped of his titles or returned to the Wheel.

At which point the Three Aspects asked if he felt better.

Less than a minute later, he was scattering priests again as he stormed out, but he was back the next day: calm, quiet, and icy in his detachment. The Three Aspects spoke and he listened. They didn't say 'karma.' They didn't say 'Fate.' They didn't, in fact, say one fucking word about his master or the stolen sutra or the encyclopedic ways in which he'd sinned. He didn't hear a lesson or empty platitudes. Instead they told him about a job they wanted done, unquiet ghosts by the old shrine west of town, and perhaps he should run along now and take care of that.

_You're on your own_ , was what he heard, _come back when you've figured out that non-attachment thing. We'll be here_.

Because they stayed, so did he. They kept him busy, and since they did a better job of it than he'd been managing, he let that stand. He didn't bother asking them why they let him stay a priest, much less a Sanzo. The one thing he was absolutely certain of was that the gods didn't give a shit what happened in the world and wouldn't lift a finger to change anyone's path. If someone was meant to reach enlightenment, then they'd find it whether Genjo Sanzo filled the office or another, and they probably got more points for effort this way.

Besides, he had to be a Sanzo to hold the Maten Sutra, and no one was taking that from him without a fight.

The head priest saw him out to the road one day at the beginning of summer, wringing thin hands and staring up at him with a mixture of consternation and banked resentment. "But you will come back, won't you? We've been honored to have your presence among us, and if there's any way to make this poor monastery more to your liking--"

He glanced down at the old man and back at the antique edifice behind him, peaked roofs dark against the rising sun. "I'll be back," he said grudgingly, knowing it was so. "There's something I have to do first."

"Priest Sanzo?"

He looked back at the road, eyes narrowing as his jaw clenched. "I'm going to shut that fucking voice up once and for all."

He left the priest staring after him, startled and confused, but that was nothing new.

***

He woke knowing that something had changed.

The walls of the cave were still sound, the bars across the entrance still unbroken, and his shackles hadn't magically broken in the night. All the same, there was something new in his world, and when he realized what it was, he thought at first that he was dreaming.

He hadn't known there was a path up to his cage, but someone was climbing it.

And then there was a man.

"Hey. You the one who's been calling me?"

Wrapped in yards of snowy cloth, sharp face impassive, the man should have looked cold, but he glowed. The sun at its zenith lit his blond hair like a halo, but he shone from the inside too, warm like the play of light outside the bars, always just out of reach. Violet eyes stared unblinking, weighing, and though the man's face was as hard as stone, his eyes were something altogether different.

He remembered words, but it still seemed a minor miracle that he could open his mouth and let them come tumbling out, knowing for once that he would be answered.

"Huh?" was all he managed on the first attempt, but a second try went better. "I haven't been calling anyone. Who are you?"

The man snorted, a short, impatient sound that made him blink. "You're lying," the man said, eyes narrowing slightly though his voice remained the same. "I've heard you all this time. Now cut the act. It's annoying."

He opened his mouth to protest--he didn't know what he'd done, so how could he cut it out?--but the man overrode him, voice implacable.

"After all...you're going to be staying with me for a while."

"I...." Staying? The man would stay? How long was a while, and did staying mean he wouldn't be alone, and-- "Stay?"

Something tightened the man's fierce expression, a hint of pain or wariness, who knew what, and he muttered an answer half to himself. "It's not as if I have any choice."

But the man reached out a hand, and he couldn't _not_ reach back, his own hand arcing up and up, lighter by the instant. Now he knew it was a dream, because the shackle on his wrist was laced with a patina of rust, the chain crumbling like dried mud as he pulled against it, as if time had finally caught up, all at once. The bars of his cell turned to sand and spilled across the cave mouth in round-topped piles, and it was the kind of dream it _hurt_ to wake from, and then his hand was caught, held, trapped by another's.

He froze at the solid reality of it, the long fingers curled around his palm, the subtle heat of skin. It wasn't a dream and it didn't fade and he held tighter, held on

***

The sudden silence made his skin crawl. Part of him didn't believe it could be as easy as that--hike a mountain, yell at a kid, and recover his sanity. The rest of him knew it wasn't that easy, because this was a _kid_. What was he supposed to do, leave the brat up here to find his own way home? And who the fuck chained a kid up in a cave for years on end, anyway? The kid was mostly hair and eyes, and nails that would have looked better on a youkai, so scrawny he could have slipped right through those bars if it weren't for the chains.

And now the kid had gone quiet, clinging to his hand like a drowner, sitting so rigid you'd think his world had just collapsed. Hell, maybe it had. How the fuck would he know? What he did know was that it was better to get the bad shit over with and leave it behind, and you couldn't do that without taking the first step.

"Hey," he said, scowling down at huge golden eyes, unnatural and trusting as a dog's. "Are you going to sit there all day? Let's get going. It's a long walk, and I'm not carrying you."

In the end, he didn't have to. He went slow and the kid kept up, gods only knew how, and by the time the sun was sinking over the mountains, he reached the bend in the path he'd picked on the way up to set up camp. His hidden packs were still there, undisturbed, and there wasn't much he didn't know about sleeping rough. He had a fire going in no time, a cigarette lit from the coals, and then he tossed some food at the kid and stepped way the hell back.

He'd never seen anyone eat like that, and he waited cynically for it to all come back up again, but the kid just sat there with his arms wrapped around his stomach and an expression of deep wonderment branded across his face. They were days away from civilization and anything resembling a market, but he weighed the likelihood of his finding anything edible in the forest against their stock of supplies and tossed the kid another wrapped bundle. He was tired, not hungry, and a smoke and a good night's sleep would take care of that.

He'd brought blankets for two, and he made certain the kid was asleep before he rolled himself up in his own. When he dreamed, he saw an unfamiliar bedroom and a pallet beside his bed, a shock of brown hair tufting across a pillow on the floor. When he woke there was a small shape curled up against his back, all knees and elbows, and he had no idea how the kid had managed it when even the lightest touch could jolt him awake with gun in hand. He would have pulled away, shoved the brat back to his own blankets, but when he shifted, the kid whimpered like an animal in pain and pushed his face against Sanzo's spine. It was fucking uncomfortable, but the silence was starting to get on his nerves. At least this way he knew the kid was alive.

"No...don't go," the kid whispered, and Sanzo let out a long sigh of resignation.

"Shut up," he said without heat. "Go back to sleep, you stupid monkey."

If he'd been more awake, he might have asked himself ' _why monkey_?' but the kid relaxed all at once, and then he could sleep too.

***

On the second day, he learned that the man who'd let him out of the cage was called Sanzo. He also learned that he should talk, a lot, even if it made Sanzo growl at him, because when he was quiet, it made Sanzo _look_ for him, like the man didn't trust that he was really there if Sanzo couldn't hear him. So he talked, and Sanzo snarled, and he talked some more, and Sanzo fed him _and_ snarled, and then he talked right up until nightfall, when Sanzo finally decided he'd had enough and told him to shut the fuck up before Sanzo gagged him with a sutra.

"Fuck," the man muttered around a cigarette, glaring at him from across the fire. "I came out here to shut you up, not listen to you chatter on like a monkey all damn day."

Despite the tone and the words, he found himself grinning hugely as Sanzo rolled his eyes. He didn't know why, but he liked it when Sanzo called him a monkey. It made him feel warm, like the sun on his shoulders.

"Hey," Sanzo said suddenly, plucking the cigarette from his lips and tossing the butt into the fire. "What's your name?"

It was one more thing he'd forgotten, but now that Sanzo had asked, it was right there again, like a gift.

"Goku," he said, and Sanzo nodded once, and that made it so.


End file.
